A collection of interests, inspirations, ideas, opinions and outcomes.

Zine – Brief and Ideas

I was briefed on my first brief of the year today and am pretty interested in it. I can see it will be a challenge which makes it even more exciting.This project is to create a Zine that holds a message of my choice. The Zine has to be A5, 12 pages long and initially using In Design.

We had a Lecture on what a Zine which told us exactly what they were and where they came from. Zine is short for Fanzine and are a small circulation (often self publishes) branch of magazines inspired by someone’s passion. The Fanzine began becoming a trend in the era of Punks when they were made as a form of anarchy. Zines were used to express a certain opinion and as they were unedited often held a true opinion rather than that of the media. They were also non-mainstream.

Zines reflected the content, shared ideas, had common aesthetics and were an easy access printed forum. Most were made using the simplistic of materials like a pen, paper, photocopier and stapler. This made them both cheap to sell and buy. Because of this Zines increased in circulation varying in genres from music to the economy, football, horror, film, literature, political, cultural ect.

Zines now have also become a tool to show people your own life, almost like a printed blog or diary. This is known as a Perzine (Personal Zine).

At the moment I am finding it a little difficult myself to think of a topic to base my Zine on, This is because Zines cover an extremely wide range of topics and although I have many ideas none feel personal yet, Some of my ideas include the idea of superstitions, formerly inspired by my mums superstitious behaviour I would look into the history of a couple of superstitions and how many people believe or even fear them.

Another idea is looking into the costume of film, I would look in to a few films where I think the costumes impact the characters. One being Del Toro’s Pans Labyrinth, the use of heavy prosthetics makes the fairytale elements of the horror come to life but also keeping the scary nature of the film. Also the idea that Del Toro may have been influenced by Alice in Wonderland, by the use of the typical Alice dress pattern and the story of a girl entering a mystery world. Other films I have thought to include are Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Gary Ross’ The Hunger Games (contrast of rich and poor) and The Wizard of Oz (Iconic shoes).

I also had some other ideas like studying the increase of interest in immersive theatre, this became an interest of mine after seeing the huge phenomena of Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man ; A Hollywood Fable. This is a Theatre piece where you are forced to wear a mask and enter a huge building that has been made to look like different areas of a town and film studio, from the dark dessert with a witches shack to a grand film studio with sets and dressing rooms. Another idea was to look into the belief of the supernatural maybe conduct tests to find proof and get other peoples experiences or beliefs on the subject.

Other Ideas Include:

Fashion: the macabre/fantasy

Storytelling

The idea of fear: adrenaline, fight or flight, what are you scared of?